The Simple Series

Hello, dear Patrons!

You may have noticed on Friday that I've kicked off another of my ongoing "Essentials" series, this time for the PlayStation 2. You can expect some pretty regular content for this column going forward, as I've recently acquire a whole heap of interesting PS2 games with a mind to writing about them — and for about 50p each, which is simply smashing. In other words, if you're a game collector, now is apparently a great time to expand your PS2 library… but not before I've grabbed everything I want to, thank you very much!

One of my more recent discoveries thanks to someone on Twitter (I forget who, so apologies if you're reading this and I haven't acknowledged you by name) is a range of games collectively known as the "Simple Series", or more accurately in the case of their PS2 incarnations, the "Simple 2000 Series".

Demolition Girl/The Daibijin

The Simple Series as a whole was an initiative by D3 Publisher to put out a wide range of low-budget and budget-priced games from a wide variety of developers, initially for the PS1 and PS2 and later expanding to a couple of other platforms such as the DS and PSP. The Simple 2000 subseries was so named because all of the games in it cost 2,000 yen (about £15) and consisted of everything from straightforward adaptations of board and card games to flawed but nonetheless enjoyable experimental games such as Demolition Girl (or The Daibijin, as it was known in Japan)

In essence, the Simple Series effectively fulfilled the function that publishers of digitally downloadable indie games do today: it provided developers with a means to get their work seen by the world, even if they weren't top-tier triple-A quality games. The low price point for these games outright acknowledged that perhaps these weren't the greatest (or maybe more accurately, the most technically impressive) games you would ever own for your PlayStation 2, but that's not really what the series was about.

As the name suggests, the Simple Series was primarily about providing experiences that were… well, simple. Many of the earlier titles in the series in particular were straightforward adaptations of things like tennis, mahjong and suchlike — and had endearingly straightforward names like The Mahjong and The Tennis as a result. As the series progressed, however, we started to see more and more creative games developed within tight budgetary constraints, such as the aforementioned Demolition Girl, Radio Helicopter (aka The Helicopter) and numerous others.

Radio Helicopter/The Helicopter

One of the most interesting things about these games is that a surprising number of them actually got localised for the European market, though their names were often changed and the concept of the "Simple Series" as a whole was removed, primarily due to a number of different European publishers handling them. Outfits such as 505 GameStreet (now just 505 Games, responsible for handling some well-regarded indie games such as Assetto Corsa, Terraria and Rocket League) and Midas Interactive became known for these low-price releases, which were often perceived as low-quality shovelware at the time, particularly when compared to the big-budget releases of larger companies.

In fact, both 505 and Midas brought across a whole host of interesting Japanese games that we probably wouldn't have seen in the West otherwise, both within the Simple Series and from the broader budget-price Japanese gaming market as a whole. This is especially interesting to consider within the broader context of the Western games business at the time; the PS2 era was around the period that Western developers were increasingly trying to make big-budget, movie-like "blockbuster" experiences, and the concept of "straight to budget" games, once a mainstay of the 8- and 16-bit home computer markets in particular, had all but ceased to exist in the West. It would come back with a vengeance (albeit in a slightly different form) once digital storefronts had become more of a thing, of course, but that wouldn't happen until the next generation of consoles and the widespread uptake of broadband Internet connections.

What the Simple Series (and games like it) shows us, then, is a different side to an era in gaming to what is normally looked back on through nostalgia goggles. Everyone knows that the PS2-era Final Fantasy games were great, for example; everyone knows that PS2 Gran Turismo was an impressive-looking game; everyone knows that Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 were landmark experiences. But what about those other games that were ignored at the time for not measuring up to their contemporaries in terms of technical expertise or amount of content?

Kuri Kuri Mix/The Adventures of Cookie and Cream

What I've found with revisiting some of these games recently is that they're a lot easier to appreciate now than they might perhaps of been "back in the day". None of them are particularly great "works of art" or anything, but what they do provide fairly consistently is a series of solid, enjoyable and worthwhile experiences that are ideal palate-cleansers between more substantial games.

So expect a lot of these games to crop up over the course of the next few weeks and months, both from within the Simple Series and also games that are of a similar "tier", such as City Crisis and Air Ranger: Rescue Helicopter (both of which, as an ardent player of SimCopter way back when, I'm particularly excited to try).

You can, of course, expect a selection of other games, too; coming up soon I'll have a writeup on FromSoftware's unusual co-operative puzzle platformer Kuri Kuri Mix (aka The Adventures of Cookies and Cream) and Spike's action RPG brawler roguelike… thing Crimson Tears, among a variety of others. Please look forward to it and all that.

Once again, thank you all very much for your kind support of MoeGamer, and I'll speak to you all again soon!